Most restaurants, hospitals and large institutions maintain kitchens and dining facilities capable of serving meals to hundreds of persons per day. Among the services provided by such facilities is the providing of a container of ice water for each diner. In the past, the hundreds of glasses of ice water required for each day's service have often been prepared and filled entirely by hand labor of waitresses or assistants who pour a measured amount of ice into each glass and then fill each glass with water from a standard tap. Where many glasses of ice water must be prepared, one or more employees can use substantially their full working day in filling glasses. Ice making and dispensing machines have been developed for the filling of a single glass, but even with the help of such a machine the task remains very laborious.
The invention of a water dispenser for filling a plurality of glasses simultaneously, as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,580,304 by Robert W. Chermacka has been of substantial help in reducing the burden of filling large numbers of glasses with water, but the task of filling them with an appropriate quantity of ice has up to now been a tedious one.
While it is highly desirable to have a dispensing apparatus which can fill a plurality of glasses simultaneously with ice, the only available apparatuses fill only single glasses. Typically, the apparatuses are often unreliable and prone to break down. Most such apparatuses are designed to function only when a supply of finely crushed ice is available. The ideal temperature conditions required to keep crushed ice from congealing into a frozen, solid mass are difficult to maintain, and almost invariably a supply of crushed ice does freeze and the previously available apparatuses become inoperative. Some apparatuses have attempted to maintain a supply of crushed ice in particulated, uncongealed form by continually agitating the ice, but such methods have been only marginally successful. Another problem which has remained unsolved up to now by the available ice dispensing machines is that because of the tendency of crushed ice to congeal and form a solid mass, the bits and pieces of ice which are dispensed from the prior art machines are irregular in size, and sometimes are large enough to cause jamming of the machine. Even if not so large as to jam the machine, oversize chunks of ice do cause substantial splashing when they fall into the filled water glasses, thereby creating clean-up problems and further inconvenience. The present invention is designed to meet and overcome these difficulties and provide a dispensing apparatus able to meet the high demands of the commercial restaurant or other facility where exceptional reliability and low rate of failure are essential.